Gigabyte AB350 Gaming 3 - UEFI woes
by bifferos from LinuxQuestions.org on (#4X028)
Firstly, I should point out this has absolutely nothing to do with my other thread about EFI+MBR partitions (this is on real hardware, the other thread was about VirtualBox).
Secondly, apologies about starting too many threads, but I know from past posts there are people here running Slackware on this motherboard so I thought this is the best place to ask.
Anyhow, with that out the way, down to my problem:
Quite simply, this motherboard has somehow 'lost' the ability to UEFI-boot a disk after a firmware upgrade. I started on firmware F23d (working), upgraded to F31 (wouldn't boot), then moved to F50a (wouldn't boot). So I did what anyone would normally do: reloaded default BIOS settings, tried again (wouldn't boot). Then I decided to downgrade the BIOS to F23 (wouldn't boot). Annoyingly the 'd' revision is no longer on the Gigabyte website but whatever.
So it looks like my problem is nothing to do with firmware revision.
Fortunately I can still UEFI-boot the slackware DVD and tell it to 'boot any installed operating system' at the grub menu, choose the elilo.efi file on my disk and I'm good to go so it's not a complete disaster.
I put another spare disk in the same machine with my new BIOS setup, UEFI-booted the slackware DVD and did an install to the alternate disk and everything works. With that spare disk booting I re-added my system disk so I could see both of them at the same time and I diffed the contents of the two EFI partitions. Only the initrd is different which I'd expect because it's generated at install time.
I also diffed the dumps of the MBRs from the two disks and that showed up nothing, and gdisk doesn't show them as being any different.
So I have one disk that for reasons unknown my Gaming-3 MB thinks is not UEFI, and another that is OK and boots, and all I can think is that somewhere on the disk something differs for the mobo to reject it but I'm unsure where. I'd prefer not to have to reinstall but it looks like I may have to and I'm wondering if this is going to happen with every BIOS update. :confused:
Anyone got any ideas?
thanks for reading this far!
Biff.
Secondly, apologies about starting too many threads, but I know from past posts there are people here running Slackware on this motherboard so I thought this is the best place to ask.
Anyhow, with that out the way, down to my problem:
Quite simply, this motherboard has somehow 'lost' the ability to UEFI-boot a disk after a firmware upgrade. I started on firmware F23d (working), upgraded to F31 (wouldn't boot), then moved to F50a (wouldn't boot). So I did what anyone would normally do: reloaded default BIOS settings, tried again (wouldn't boot). Then I decided to downgrade the BIOS to F23 (wouldn't boot). Annoyingly the 'd' revision is no longer on the Gigabyte website but whatever.
So it looks like my problem is nothing to do with firmware revision.
Fortunately I can still UEFI-boot the slackware DVD and tell it to 'boot any installed operating system' at the grub menu, choose the elilo.efi file on my disk and I'm good to go so it's not a complete disaster.
I put another spare disk in the same machine with my new BIOS setup, UEFI-booted the slackware DVD and did an install to the alternate disk and everything works. With that spare disk booting I re-added my system disk so I could see both of them at the same time and I diffed the contents of the two EFI partitions. Only the initrd is different which I'd expect because it's generated at install time.
I also diffed the dumps of the MBRs from the two disks and that showed up nothing, and gdisk doesn't show them as being any different.
So I have one disk that for reasons unknown my Gaming-3 MB thinks is not UEFI, and another that is OK and boots, and all I can think is that somewhere on the disk something differs for the mobo to reject it but I'm unsure where. I'd prefer not to have to reinstall but it looks like I may have to and I'm wondering if this is going to happen with every BIOS update. :confused:
Anyone got any ideas?
thanks for reading this far!
Biff.